Archive for the ‘Russia’ Category

By the time of the U.S. presidential election in November 2020, historical experience and the condition of global money markets suggest that the current global economic boom will probably have run its course. While the latest government economic figures show the current boom continuing in the United States and Europe, serious crises have already hit the currencies of Argentina and Turkey.

The dollar after a period of weakness has begun rising against the euro and other currencies and against gold. This sudden dollar strength is not only the result of rising U.S. interest rates. Trump’s threat to impose high tariffs on a whole range of commodities starting on July 6 has set off a flight into the dollar due to its role as the international means of payment. We have seen many such flights into the dollar over the years whenever a crisis threatens, whether political, military or economic.

If no compromise is reached by July 6 and Trump’s tariffs – and the retaliatory tariffs of competing nations – go into effect, it is possible that some commodity sales will fall through, which could trigger an international credit crisis. If severe enough, such a crisis would quickly throw the global capitalist economy into recession. This is all the more likely given the very late stage in the current industrial cycle, which has made the global credit system increasingly fragile even in the absence of a trade war. Whatever happens in the short run, Trump’s economic nationalist “America First” policies are undermining the entire world order that has prevailed since 1945. But that is the subject for another post.

Because capitalist economic crises tend to manifest themselves first in the spheres of currency and then credit, many reformers have sought cures for crises through reforms to the currency and credit systems. This creates the illusion in the minds of middle-class reformers, who stand between the two main class camps of modern society, the capitalist class and the working class, that the contradictions of capitalist society can be overcome through reforming the credit/monetary system. The U.S., in particular, has produced numerous monetary reform movements.

The year 2016 marks the centenary of V.I. Lenin’s famous pamphlet “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” subtitled “A Popular Outline.” The pamphlet has immensely influenced politics of the last century. This is largely but not only because the author the following year became the leader of the first socialist revolution as well as chief inspirer and de facto leader of the Third (Communist) International—also known as the Comintern. If Lenin had not led the first socialist revolution and/or had not lived to found the Third International, the pamphlet would still have had considerable influence but of course not the influence it has had.

A century after Lenin’s “Imperialism” appeared, Monthly Review Press published “Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century,” by the British Marxist John Smith. As the title indicates, this book aims to do for the Marxist analysis of imperialism in our new century what Lenin’s “Imperialism” did for the last. Smith holds against innumerable critics that Lenin’s basic thesis was not only correct for its own time but also for our own, at least in broad outline.

But Smith’s book is more ambitious than that, and this is what attracted the interest of this blog. Smith is not entirely satisfied with Lenin’s work, which in the Third International, and the more loosely organized international Communist movement that continued after the Third International was dissolved in 1943, was often treated as virtually on a par with Marx’s “Capital.” Smith is dissatisfied with Lenin’s classic pamphlet because, unlike Marx in “Capital,” Lenin does not directly apply value theory. Value analysis is implicit rather than explicit as it is in “Capital.”

Smith in his “Imperialism” attempts to accomplish two tasks. One, he attempts to update Lenin’s “Imperialism.” More ambitiously, he attempts to “complete” Lenin’s work, bringing it into line with Marx’s “Capital,” first published 150 years ago this year. Smith explicitly puts value analysis at the center of his analysis of modern imperialism.

As the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president approached, a political uproar unfolded in Washington that was more fury than substance. A little more than a week before Trump took the oath of office, the on-line site BuzzFeed published an unverified 35-page document by a “former” member of MI6, Britain’s counterpart of the CIA, on Trump’s alleged relationship with the Russian government and its intelligence agencies. Reportedly, the document was originally created on behalf of anti-Trump—Republicans eager to find some dirt that could be used to stop the billionaire political adventurer in the Republican primaries.

The text’s most sensational part was the claim that Russian intelligence obtained documentation of Trump’s perverted sexual tastes while he was staying at the Ritz-Carleton hotel during a visit to the Russian capital in 2013. It is well documented by many other sources that Trump has abused women throughout his adult life. So even if the claims of the document are taken at face value—they would, to tell the truth, be rather tame stuff. For the record, President Trump has strongly denied the allegations, as has the Russian government.

Far more importantly, the document claims that, in exchange for the help of Russian intelligence obtaining and distributing through Wikileaks damning evidence about the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Trump’s business organizations passed information about the activities of “Russian oligarchs” in the West back to Russian intelligence. If true, that would mean that Trump engaged in activities that could leave him open to charges of spying for a foreign power, namely Russia, an impeachable offence. Could this form the basis of bi-partisan—”Party of Order“-sponsored—articles of impeachment against Donald Trump in the not too distant future? Stay tuned on that one.

The attempt of the Republican and U.S. political establishments to deny Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination collapsed on May 3, when Trump won a decisive victory over his two remaining rivals in the Indiana Republican primary. Trump routed Tea Party darling Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Governor John Kasick, probably Wall Street’s favorite among the remaining candidates to succeed termed-out President Barack Obama next year. Kasick’s share of the vote ended up in single digits.

In the weeks leading up to the Indiana primary, Cruz and Kasick had announced a bloc to deny Trump a majority of the delegates needed for nomination on the first ballot at the Republican convention in July. If this bloc had succeeded on the second or, if necessary, later ballots, delegates pledged to Trump on the first ballot would have been free to vote for somebody “acceptable” to the large capitalists—somebody like John Kasick.

In the weeks leading up to the Indiana, New York and New England Republican primaries, the media had pictured the Trump campaign as at long last in deep trouble. Headlines like “Trump’s Worse Week” were splashed across the major newspapers and associated websites. The corporate press made much of the success Cruz had in picking up a few delegates here and there delivered to him on a silver plate by state Republican machines in service to Wall Street interests.

But these maneuvers came to nothing after Trump swept first the New York primary and then the New England primaries, with majorities as opposed to the mere pluralities he had won in primaries held earlier.

Earlier, there had been a lot more Republicans in the presidential race. They included Wall Street’s original favorite Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and son of former President George H. W. Bush and brother of the hated George W. Bush. Unlike his brother, Jeb was considered to be an “intelligent conservative.”

But Jeb Bush got very few votes and was forced out of the race after the South Carolina primary. As more Republicans were forced to drop out, the race to defeat Trump came down to the extreme neoliberal Senator Ted Cruz and the “moderate”—but still very neoliberal—John Kasick.

Cruz would be more in the mold of Ronald Reagan, while Kasick would be more like George W. Bush. Certainly, the conventional wisdom went, the “anti-Trump” majority among Republican voters would rally around these two candidates whose support of traditional Republican neoliberal economic policies would make either one more acceptable than Trump to Wall Street.

Eventually, the conventional wisdom went, either Kasick or Cruz would emerge as the nominee to face off against pro-Wall Street Democrat Hillary Clinton in November. But just the opposite happened when Trump won first in New York and then the New England states with outright majorities, and then won in Indiana, also with an outright majority, where Cruz had been expected to do well. Cruz and Kasick were then forced to withdraw from the race leaving only Trump.

On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Reich chancellor, the most powerful office in the government. But there were only two other Nazis in the cabinet. In terms of cabinet members, traditional reactionaries such as Franz Von Papen (1879-1969)—the vice-chancellor—and the arch reactionary media baron and Nationalist Party leader Alfred Hugenburg (1865-1951) dominated the government.

Hugenburg was the Rupert Murdock of Germany. Leaving aside the Nazis, Alfred Hugenburg’s Nationalist Party was considered Germany’s most right wing, representing the large landowners. Hugenburg held the Ministry of Economics and Food, a ministry of considerable interest to Germany’s large landowners.

The Communist movement at first believed Hugenburg, not Hitler, was the dominant member of the new government. Not only were Nazis a small minority in the cabinet but the Prussian landowner and militarist Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) still occupied the presidency and had the power to appoint and dismiss the chancellor.

The view that Hitler was not the real power in the cabinet, however, ignored several crucial facts. One was that the two Nazi ministers besides Hitler gave the Nazis control over the bulk of Germany’s police forces. The Ministry of the Interior was awarded to Nazi Wilhelm Frick (1877-1946), a lawyer and policeman by profession. The other Nazi, Herman Goering (1893-1946), held the post of minister without portfolio and, more importantly, served as acting minister of the interior for the State of Prussia. This gave Goering effective control of Germany’s police force, including its political branch—the “red squad” in U.S. terminology. The Prussian red squad was soon given a new name—State Secret Police, or Gestapo for short.

Even more importantly, the Nazis were not just another bourgeois political party, only further to the right. They were a combat organization with a huge SA militia, whose membership numbered in the millions—compared to only 100,000 for the official German military, the maximum allowed under the Treaty of Versailles. Members were recruited mostly from Germany’s desperate middle-class youth, who had few prospects in Depression-bound Germany. The SA was organized to wage civil war against all wings of the workers’ movement—especially the Communists but also the Social Democratic Party, the trade unions, cooperatives, youth groups, and so on, in the streets of Germany.

Imagine if Donald Trump today commanded a private army of tens of millions of mostly middle-class youths, dwarfing in size both the regular army and all police forces of the U.S. Imagine further that this militia was fanatically loyal to Trump’s person. Further imagine that this private army was waging violent war in the streets against the trade unions, all African American organizations, Mexican-American organizations, immigrant rights groups, and Muslim and Arab organizations. This is what a full-fledged, Nazi-like mass fascist movement would look like in the early 21st-century U.S.

As the Soviet army swept westward toward Germany in 1945 and the American and British armies advanced eastward into Germany, soldiers in these armies were in for a shock. They would notice a peculiar smell in the air and then would arrive at one of the Nazi death camps.

These soldiers had been subjected to propaganda designed to portray the German enemy in the worst possible terms. Such wartime propaganda often takes more than a few liberties with the truth. In the case of the Soviet soldiers, they had plenty of experience with “the fascists,” as they called them, and their unspeakable crimes against the peoples of the occupied territories in the Soviet Union. These battle-hardened Soviet soldiers would expect the worst from the Germans.

But nothing could prepare them for what they found in the Nazi death camps. I will not attempt to describe it here. Today it is possible to watch videos of World War II Nazi death camps that are stored in digital form on the Internet. I would, however, advise anybody who is curious to watch these videos on an empty stomach.

A common reaction among the U.S. and British soldiers after they observed—and smelled—the horrors of the death camps was to tell the interviewers that now they knew what they were fighting for. The Soviet soldiers already knew what they were fighting for, but even they were shocked.

The reaction of one British soldier in one of the videos I streamed in preparation for this post unwittingly shed light on what had really happened. Interviewed many years after the war, he expressed amazement that the Germans could do this to “fellow Europeans” who simply practiced a “different faith.” A German Nazi would have explained that this was not true. The people murdered in the camps were not, our Nazi would have explained, Europeans at all. Nor were they murdered because they had a different faith. The death camp victims had to be liquidated because they were a different race.

According to the Nazis, the “great race” of white European Nordic Aryans were merely defending themselves against the racial “aggression” of the Jewish people and other “Asiatic” races such as the Roma—the so-called gypsies. In reality, our Nazi, assuming he was well educated in the “racial science” taught in all the educational institutions of the Third Reich, would explain that the Jews were a bastard Asiatic race mixed with “Negroid” elements. They had come to Europe to destroy the Nordic white Aryan race, who were the only creative race in the world and the hope of all humankind. Certainly, the Nazi would explain, a British soldier of “Nordic Germanic Aryan stock” should understand this in light of their own rich struggle against other races throughout its vast empire.

For 12 years, this lesson that the Jews, appearances to the contrary, were not white Europeans, was driven into the head of every German through the educational system from elementary school right through the universities, on the radio, in “educational” newsreels shown in movie theaters, as well through the various branches of Germany’s boy and girl scout movement—the “Hitler Youth.”

Anybody who wanted to challenge the Nazi “racial science” had no access to any media either printed, motion picture or radio. They would have to settle for word of mouth or illegally reproduced pamphlets. And if you were caught, you ran the risk being thrown into a concentration camp yourself or even being legally executed.

But what about before 1933, when Hitler came to power? Between 1918 and 1933, Germany was a (bourgeois) democracy, and before 1914 the existence of a large well-organized workers’ movement made it possible to legally oppose racist and anti-semitic ideas.

As the Cuban presidential and congressional elections of 1952 approached, it appeared that the democratic-nationalist Party of the Cuban People, more commonly known as the Orthodox Party, was about to capture the Cuban presidency. This set off alarm bells in Washington. The U.S. government feared the election of a democratic-nationalist government in Cuba would encourage democratic anti-imperialist forces throughout Latin America. In response, Washington supported a coup d’etat by another presidential candidate, one who had no chance of winning a democratic presidential election.

That was Colonial Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973). Batista had headed the Cuban military during the 1930s and 1940s, dominating the Cuban government from behind the scenes. Between 1940 and 1944, Batista served one term as elected legal president of Cuba. After completing his term, Batista left Cuba and moved to the United States. He later returned to Cuba to run what appeared to be a doomed presidential bid. In reality, Batista was preparing with Washington’s support to seize power illegally to block a victory by the Orthodox Party. Batista’s coup cut off any hope for democratic change in Cuba through electoral methods.

The young Fidel Castro (1926-), a former radical student leader, had run for Congress on the Orthodox ticket during the aborted 1952 election campaign. Castro, a lawyer by profession, then sued Batista for overthrowing the legal government of Cuba, but that failed to dislodge the dictator. Fidel then organized, along with other young Cubans, an uprising on July 26, 1953, at the Moncada Barracks, hoping it would develop into an island-wide insurrection that would bring down the Batista dictatorship. Many of Castro’s associates were killed in the abortive uprising, but Fidel survived.

The Batista government then tried Castro on the charge of attempting to overthrow the Cuban government by force and violence. Castro’s defense was brilliant. At the trial, he pointed out that the Batista government itself was guilty of precisely the charge that it made against him. Fidel’s defense was published under the title “History Will Absolve Me” and circulated within Cuba.

While Batista’s judges found Castro guilty and sentenced him to 15 years in prison, Batista effectively lost the case before the Cuban people. As a result, in 1955 the Batista government was forced to release Castro. Unable to do much within the legality of the Batista dictatorship, Castro went into exile, where he was to meet a young left-wing Argentinian medical doctor named Ernesto Guevara (1928-1967). Guevara went by his Argentinian nickname “Che”.

The young Guevara had been in Guatemala when the democratically elected government of Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1913-1971) was overthrown in a Washington-organized coup in 1954. President Arbenz, who had won the 1951 Guatemalan elections, had attempted to carry out a land-reform program that was bitterly opposed by the infamous U.S.-based United Fruit Company. United Fruit had long dominated the Guatemalan economy and was bitterly opposed to President Árbenz’s reforms.

In response, Washington falsely claimed that the democratically elected Arbenz government was “communist.” The CIA-organized coup that overthrew him resembled the Cuban coup of 1952. The result was decades of brutal dictatorship that cost the lives of thousands of Guatemalans. The experience of witnessing a Washington-organized coup against a democratically elected government further radicalized the young Che Guevara.

In 1955, in Mexico, Guevara met Fidel Castro, who had just been released from prison in Cuba. In 1956, the two men and a few supporters including Fidel’s younger brother Raul rented a yacht called the Granma. They set sail to Cuba with the intention of launching a guerrilla war aimed at overthrowing the Batista dictatorship. To accomplish this, Fidel had organized a multi-class organization, the July 26 movement, that combined militant young workers and bourgeois democrats who were prepared to struggle arms in hand against the dictatorship.

At first, the landing proved to be a disaster, but Fidel, Raul, Che and few other survivors managed to escape into the Sierra Maestra mountain range and began to organize the peasants who lived there into a rebel army.

Though in terms of numbers and arms the guerrilla forces were no match for the far more numerous professionally trained forces of Batista’s army, the latter had one disadvantage that was to prove fatal to them. Most of the rank and file had no desire to die for the cause of the Cuban “pseudo-republic,” which had lost all pretext of legitimacy as a result of Batista’s 1952 coup. As a result, toward the end of 1958 Batista’s army began to disintegrate. As New Year’s Eve approached, the dictator prepared to flee the island with as much loot as he could take with him.

There were last-minute attempts to save the Cuban military and police apparatus by setting up a junta that would negotiate with the rebel army. However, Fidel insisted on the dismantling of the so-called Cuban army that failed to defend Cuba from its only real enemy—the United States—but instead served as a police force—and a very brutal and corrupt one at that—for U.S. imperialism. Therefore, when Batista fled on New Year’s Eve, not only did Batista’s personal dictatorship collapse but the entire, thoroughly rotten, military-police apparatus of the Cuban bourgeois state as well.

This March marks the 30th anniversary of the election of Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of general secretary of the then-ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At first, the election of Gorbachev seemed to involve a long overdue shift of power to a new generation of Soviet leaders. As we now know, it involved a lot more.

A process was unleashed that was soon to be called “Perestroika.” In the name of “radical economic reforms,” the Soviet planned economy was progressively dismantled. Perestroika ended not only with the restoration of capitalism but the breakup of what had been the Soviet federation.

The combined process of the restoration of capitalism and breakup of the Soviet federation was accompanied by a massive collapse of both industrial and agricultural production. The living standards and life expectancy of the working class plummeted. A generation later, the economies of not only the Russian federation but the economies of the other former republics are yet to recover.

Perestroika led to a wave of capitalist counterrevolutions that in 1989 swept through eastern Europe with the active support not only of imperialism, as would be expected, but also the Gorbachev government. As part of this process, Germany was reunited on a capitalist basis while staying in NATO. The former socialist countries that had been members of the now dissolved Warsaw Pact joined NATO as did the former Soviet Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The Georgia Republic—Stalin’s homeland—is very close to NATO and openly striving to become a formal member, while the new right-wing government in Ukraine has joined NATO in all but name.

Perestroika, therefore, resulted in a massive expansion of the U.S. world empire into the one area of the planet—the Soviet Union and its allies—that remained outside the Empire after World War II.

The destruction of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc and their planned economies would have been enough if that was all that was involved. But it was not. The capitalists and their spokespeople everywhere pointed to the Soviet collapse as final proof that “socialism had failed.” The result was a wave of demoralization that spread through a workers’ movement that was already in retreat before the neoliberal capitalist offensive symbolized by such political figures as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

National liberation movements were also pushed back, though the hopes of political figures such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush that the old-fashioned colonialism that had dominated the world in 1914 would return—with the difference that the United States and not Britain or France would be the chief colonizer—has not been so easy to achieve.

Between November 7, 1917, when the Bolshevik-led Congress of Soviets seized power, and the election of Gorbachev as general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee in March 1985, the peoples of the oppressed nations got accustomed to the idea that they should be independent and not colonial slaves of the West. Therefore, attempts by the U.S. world empire to push these nations and peoples back into something like pre-1914 colonial relationships have met, to the chagrin of the imperialists, unexpected and growing resistance.

A major feature of the current global economic conjuncture is the financial-economic crisis that has hit Russia.

On Dec. 16, 2014, the central bank of the Russian Federation raised its benchmark interest rate to 17 percent from 10.5 percent. This is a far cry from the zero to .25 percent the U.S. Federal Reserve System maintains for its key interest rate, the federal funds rate. During 2014, the Russian ruble fell 45 percent against the U.S. dollar, while the Russian central bank sold some $80 billion of its foreign reserves in an attempt to halt the fall.

By raising its benchmark interest rate to 17 percent, the Russian central bank hopes to stem the bleeding of its reserves while checking the ruble’s decline. The catch is that such a dramatic and sudden rise in interest rates is almost certain to plunge the Russian economy into recession in 2015, with rising unemployment. As demand contracts within the home market, Russian businesses will be forced to sell more of their national production on the world market and import less of the production of other countries, causing a decline in Russia’s standard of living. Eventually, the balance of trade will swing back in Russia’s favor but on the backs of the Russian working class and other Russian working people.

The current financial-economic crisis in Russia is made worse by the sanctions the U.S. and its West European satellites have imposed on Russia. These sanctions are in response to Russia’s defensive move in the Crimean Peninsula. Responding to widespread demands within Crimea in the wake of the seizure of power by far-right anti-Russian forces in Kiev in February 2014, Russia agreed to allow Crimea to rejoin the Russia Federation. The crisis in Ukraine, which at times reached the level of civil war during 2014, resulted from the U.S.-supported neo-liberal/fascist coup after months of right-wing demonstrations in Kiev.

The coup government has severely restricted civil liberties in Ukraine, forcing Ukrainian working-class parties underground while re-orienting the Ukrainian economy towards Western Europe. In addition, Ukraine has all but in name joined NATO, the main military wing of the U.S. imperialist world empire. Kiev hopes to make its NATO membership official at the earliest possible date.

Rising tension between the U.S. empire and Russia

The move by the U.S. empire to draw Ukraine into its military and economic domain has increased tension between Russia and the U.S. to its highest level since the restoration of capitalism in Russia a quarter of a century ago.

The imperialist media and certain people on the left have pictured present-day Russia as a virtual “second coming” of Nazi Germany. Russia, it is claimed, attacked Ukraine without provocation. As a result, a resurgent Russia is now threatening virtually all the countries of eastern and central Europe and ultimately “the West” itself. Unless something is done to check Putin’s “aggression,” it is claimed by imperialist propagandists, there is a danger of all of Europe falling under the Kremlin’s domination.

Other people on the left have drawn a quite different conclusion. They argue that far from a resurgent Russian imperialism, the U.S. and its European satellites have launched a new “cold war” against Russia.

This August marked the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. Could it happen again? Before exploring this question, I should review how the world has changed since those European summer days of a century ago.

I have already examined in this blog the changes in imperialism—the underlying cause of the “Great War”—over the last hundred years. But before I explore the question of whether something like the Great War could happen again, I should briefly summarize these changes.

The main powers in Europe

At the start of 1914, there were a number of independent imperialist “powers,” as they were called, that were in economic, political and, as events were soon to demonstrate, military competition with one another. In Europe, the main powers were Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Austria.

Britain had been for the preceding century—since the defeat of Napoleon—the most powerful country in the world. Britain’s military power was largely naval. As the British chauvinists put it, Britannia ruled the waves. It was naval power that held the English empire—“where the sun never set”—together. In turn, British naval power was made possible by its highly advanced—for the time—industry.

France, which had been Britain’s primary rival in the world war that followed the French Revolution, was a significant imperialist power in its own right. It had a large empire in Africa, Indochina and elsewhere. Its industrialization, however, had always lagged behind that of Great Britain.

As a result, large amounts of idle money capital tended to pile up in France compared to the situation in the more dynamic capitalist countries. Since the French capitalists converted a relatively smaller amount of their money capital into industrial capital, a relatively larger amount was converted into loan capital—finance capital. Much of this capital was loaned abroad, especially in Russia.

By the beginning of the 20th century, however, France was no longer Britain’s most important rival within Europe. Germany, due to its rapid industrialization, had replaced France in that role. In Germany, capitalist production based on the latest technology was developing fast. Because its industrialization had come later than Britain or France’s—Germany wasn’t even unified as a country until the 1870s—Germany had relatively few colonies.

However, unlike the case in France and increasingly Britain, the German capitalists tended to quickly convert the money capital that passed through their hands into productive capital—both constant and variable. Therefore, finance capital developed somewhat differently in Germany than it did in Britain and France. In Germany, there was a need to mobilize every spare penny and place it in the hands of the industrial capitalists. As a result, Germany’s banking system was ultra-modern, with both commercial and investment banking centralized in a small number of huge “universal banks.”

This stood in contrast to the older British and to a large extent even the U.S. pattern, where commercial and investment banking were conducted by separate companies. The biggest of the German universal banks was the Deutsch Bank, which remains to this day Germany’s most powerful bank.